


I Heard You, In My Dreams

by IntoTheDarkNight



Category: Throne of Glass Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Alternate Universe, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Mental Institutions, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:47:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28426515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IntoTheDarkNight/pseuds/IntoTheDarkNight
Summary: When Aelin is captured by Maeve, somedays it becomes difficult for Aelin to distinguish between reality and fiction.  Most times, she is able to find her way back.  But when one torturous scene becomes so lifelike and realistic, will Aelin be able to find her way out?In one of Maeve's tricks to drag the location of the Wyrdkeyes out of Aelin, she makes Aelin think she's in a mental hospital in an alternate universe.
Relationships: Aelin Ashryver Galathynius | Celaena Sardothien/Rowan Whitethorn
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	I Heard You, In My Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I'll be updating the warning/triggers for each chapter, but I don't plan on having anything too serious be in this story but just be mindful of the tags if you're worried :)

Two men were out in the sun-kissed field, golden stalks of wheat bending gently as the wind whispered by. One waved his hand, beckoning for her to join him. Face pressed up against the glass, she watched as he turned away, wading through the knee-high field to his rejoin his companion. Everything was silent; there was a complete and total absence of sound inside her room, but if she strained her ears, she thought maybe she could hear the barking of the dog as he leaped and bounded after his owner, brown coat shining and reflecting the afternoon sun.

The man reached his companion and in unison they turned to look at her, mirrored heads tilted in question: Are you coming? Panic began to creep over her, starting in the tingling of her fingers and working its way up to her throat, constricting its vice-like grip around her airway, cutting off oxygen until yellow and black spots danced before her. She needed to be out there. She needed to go with them. She raised a hand, fingers still numb, and banged it—just once—against the glass. It didn’t make a sound.

“I can’t,” she mouthed, unable to form words. “The glass…I can’t get out.”

The second man shook his head sadly at her, pulled his gray cap down to hide his face and turned, slowly walking away from her. She banged her hand once more against the glass, eyes burning vision turning white. “Wait!” She tried to scream, but she thought maybe somebody had come in and clipped her vocal cords while she was sleeping, stealing them away from her in the dead of night.  
The first man, the one who had beckoned to her before, still stood staring at her from an insurmountable distance away. The dog sat patiently at his feet, eyes watching the other slowly fade away into the distance, blending back into the forest from which he came.

They couldn’t leave her alone. They couldn’t. She didn’t know why, but she knew she needed to go with them, needed to get out of this room. If she didn’t leave now, she would be stuck here forever, trapped in this place with no sound. She knew she would hear birds chirping on the other side of the glass, knew that things would make sense once again if only she could get outside. She needed to get out. Now.

Movement caught her eye, and she saw the man point towards the corner of her window. “Look,” she thought she saw his mouth say. She twisted her head, palm still pressed to the cool hard glass, and looked and looked and looked and then she saw it. A crack she hadn’t noticed before, a small hole where part of the glass was missing. Big enough for her head to fit through, maybe her shoulders. How had she not noticed it before? 

She crouched down, running her fingers over the serrated edges of the hole. The wire screen behind had somehow dislodged from the corner of the window, the screen curling up upon itself. A warm breeze brushed her face, rifling her hair. She closed her eyes, inhaling deeply and absorbing the sweet scent of the outside world. The soft ocean-y sound of the summer wind made her cry, and she sat there for a moment, reveling in the first bit of freedom she was allowed to taste.

Grass crunched beneath heavy boots and small paws, and she looked up to see the man and his dog now standing only a few feet in front of her. He remained silent, lifting his hand once more to coax her forward. And maybe it was just the tears leaking from the corners of her eyes and blurring her vision, but she couldn’t seem to categorize the features of his face, seeing only a smear of pine-green when she tried to focus on his eyes.

It didn’t matter anyway. It was time to leave. She stuck her hand through the hole, wincing only slightly as the broken glass scraped and bit at her skin. She grasped the wire screen and yanked as hard as she could, once, twice, three times until it sprang free from the sides of the window and bounced with a gentle twang to the grass. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the man’s blood red lips—now the only distinguishable feature on his face—smirk upwards into a one-sided smile, before he let out a low whistle to his dog and began to walk away.

“Wait,” she cried, fleeting relief masking the panic only for a second when she could hear her own voice, scratchy and hoarse from disuse. “Wait for me, I’m coming. I’m coming with you.”

She studied the hole in the glass, determined it was too small to fit her shoulders through, and immediately began pounding as hard as she could on the window. Small cracks began forming after four hits, spreading wider and wider until a spider’s web of slits and cracks spread across the windowpane. She lifted her head to look at the man, to ask him for help, and let out a distraught wail when she realized he was almost to the edge of the meadow, his figure as small as a penny against the dark forest beyond him. 

“WAIT!” she screamed, voice cracking and splintering like she wished the glass would. She pounded harder, using both hands formed into clenched fists as she beat against the glass harder than she had ever hit anything in her life. “WAAAIT,” she sobbed, “PLEASE! PLEASE JUST WAIT!”

She sprung up from the floor, ready to begin kicking the glass when she noticed the wire screen was attached back to the window and the cracks in the glass where growing smaller, shrinking faster and faster as she watched. 

“Nonononononononono,” she moaned, and began pounding on the glass again. Her fists bounced back as if against rubber, and she collapsed back onto the floor, stuck her face against the disappearing hole in the glass and screamed. “WAIT! COME BACK! DON’T LEAVE ME HERE ALONEEEEE!” Her throat burned, ached, screams scorching the back of her throat as she continued to yell, continued to bang on the glass. 

He was gone. She pressed her hands to the glass, eyes whipping back and forth as she desperately searched for the man among the golden wheat and the roiling crimson sky. But he was nowhere to be seen. He was gone. And she was alone. 

&

Bright, harsh luminescent light ripped its way through her closed eyelids and jolted her awake. She sat up, body trembling as she took in her surroundings and her memories slowly drifted back to her. WhereamIwhereamIwhereamIwhereamIwhe…Oh, that’s right. Blank paper-white painted walls, high uniform plaster ceiling with no tiles, adjoining open bathroom and hard uncomfortable bed. She was in the hospital.

“Good morning, Aelin!” a voice chirped from her left, and Aelin turned her head to see a short woman nearly bursting out of her blue scrubs, brown hair neatly tucked into a bun and a name tag with the name “Mindy” and an orange smiley face sticker dangling from the front of her shirt.

“It’s vitals and pill time, you know the drill! Let me see that arm, girlie.” Aelin buried her head in her hands, rubbed roughly at her eyes in an attempt to scrub away the nerve-wracking remnants of the dream she had just escaped from. 

“Oooh, honey, rough night?” Mindy questioned, gently commandeering one of Aelin’s arms to wrap a blood pressure cuff around it, while simultaneously slipping an oxygen monitor on the middle finger of her other hand. 

Aelin just shrugged and stared intently at the fabric of her blanket, tracing the individual woven strands with her eyes, picking out patterns in the fabric while wishing Mindy would just leave. It’s not that she disliked the nurse: she just hated all of them and wished they would burn in hell. It was best just to not talk to them. Anything she said to them could potentially be used against her, her words a weapon used to keep her here longer. Best to stay silent.

Mindy was apparently used to her silence and didn’t expect an answer. She tutted over the machine, fussing with the cuff and read off Aelin’s numbers once the machine beeped and she felt the cuff relax against her arm. “Hmmm 107/68, still a little low. Have you been eating, honey?”

Aelin nodded, and, satisfied with the response, Mindy tutted once more and then forced a small plastic cup into Aelin’s hand. “Alright, here we go.” The nurse began to list off the meds one by one as she popped them into Aelin’s cup, stopping only when the tiny white oblong pills filled the cup halfway to the top. Aelin stared at them in disgust.

“Alright sweet pea, here’s some water for ya.” Mindy’s tone morphed into the no-nonsense voice all the nurses adopted whenever it was medication time. “Go on now, take them all please.”

This was the tricky part. Some nurses were more observant than others, made you open your mouth to check to see if you were hiding any pills. Aelin’s head was too foggy, to screwed up and ringing and clanging and echoing with the sounds of her own screams for her to remember if Mindy was one of those nurses or not. She didn’t want their damn pills. She didn’t need them to ‘get better’ or whatever nonsense they tried to shove down her throat along with the medication. There was nothing wrong with her, mentally or physically, except for the fact that she had been betrayed and was now being held hostage against her will. The pills messed with her head, made her drowsy and forgetful, turned her days and nights into one long blur and tangled web of memories until she could no longer differentiate between real and imagined.

A small voice in the back of her head whispered that she couldn’t trust Mindy. If Mindy caught her hiding pills in her mouth to spit out later, she could possibly be moved to an isolation room or worse, report it to the doctor and then her release date would be pushed back farther than it already was. She tried to comb through her brain to find a reason why she shouldn’t take the pills today, but she was meeting with the doctor and therapist tomorrow. After the haunting dream she just had, maybe she deserved to drift along the blurred edge of reality. 

So she swallowed the pills, obediently opening her mouth when Mindy ordered (ha, the voice had been right) and then flopped back down on her bed when the door closed behind the nurse and her parting message that breakfast was in an hour. Just like it was every day. Just like it had been for the 7 (SEVEN) painful days Aelin had been imprisoned in this hellhole. 

She didn’t belong here. She didn’t belong here with all of these people, she wasn’t fucked in the head like them. So what if she had a history of self-sabotaging? So what if she got a little sad (okay, maybe a lot) some days and couldn’t get out of bed. That was normal. Everybody went through those ups and downs. That was just part of life. They kept telling her she needed to be here, kept rattling off all of these fancy diagnoses explaining why she needed to be in the hospital, why she needed to be on seven different medications for the multiple ‘disorders’ they claimed she had. Bullshit. All of it: bullshit. She was perfectly fine. Somebody wanted her in here for a reason, and she was going to find out why.

So far, she had little luck narrowing down a suspect. She had lots of enemies, it was true. It came with the territory of being a raging fire-breathing bitch queen, as people so fondly liked to call her. But she had been safe, she had been smart. She was always smart. Once she got an award in high school for getting the highest grades in the class. What was that called? Valedictorian? Valedictionary? Dictionary? She didn’t have a dictionary with her. Didn’t need it, but also couldn’t have it. Too heavy, could be used as a weapon. Lots of things could be used as weapons, if you were creative enough. Once, she’d—fuck. She was already losing her focus, losing control over her own thoughts. She fucking hated these meds, needed to figure out which ones made her drift away like this. She needed to get out of here.

A sharp rap on the door startled her from her thoughts, and a head poked around the corner of her open door. “Aelin, time for breakfast.”

Had an hour already passed? Jesus Christ. She gathered her strength, and then slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position. She needed to get dressed. She sat at the end of her bed, feet dangling over the edge. She should get dressed. And brush her hair. Pushing herself off the bed, Aelin staggered over to the row of wooden cupboard doors lining one side of her room. Gripping the metal handles with both hands, she gave a sharp yank. They didn’t open. She tried again. They didn’t open.

She swore under her breath. She forgot to ask the nurse to unlock them when she came in this morning. The cupboards with her few meager personal belongings were kept locked unless you asked a staff member to get something out for you. To Aelin, that kind of defeated the purpose of having storage in her room at all, if she couldn’t access it when she wanted. Rolling her eyes, she trudged to the bathroom, bending down to eye herself in the tiny plastic (and unbreakable) mirror above her (also tiny and plastic) sink but then immediately thought better of it. She really didn’t care to see her reflection right now. 

For a moment, Aelin debated about skipping breakfast altogether and just going back to bed. But she was scared she would have another unsettling dream (those were the only kinds she seemed to have in this place) and she also wanted to ask Lysandra what she thought her dream meant. So, breakfast it was. 

Aelin slipped out of her door, wearing the same clothes she had gone to bed in, carefully closing it behind her before walking down the empty hallway to the dining hall. Her bare feet slipped along the floor and she counted the steps, keeping her eyes glued to the wooden floor. Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleven steps to the end of this hallway, one left turn and then sixteen steps until the dining hall. She knew the dimensions of this place by heart. 

A line had formed in front of the dining room, the patients lining up and waiting for their name to be called like they did before every meal. Aelin joined the back of the line, unnoticed, distantly wishing that she could feel something right now besides the overwhelming and numbing sense of feeling absolutely nothing at all.

An elbow nudged her roughly in between her shoulders, and she looked up to see a nurse standing in front of her, a tray clutched in his hands. “Aelin, your food,” he said, voice laced with the irritated undertone of someone who has had to repeat themselves more than once. If only she could care.

Without a word, Aelin took the tray from the nurse, admiring the cool slide of the plastic against her hands, and made her way into the dining hall. Lysandra was already in their normal spot, a small round table nestled up against one of the only two windows in the room, overlooking a parking lot several stories below. It was the prime table to eat at, they thought, because they could make up life-stories for the people rushing in and out of the hospital. It was normally quite empty at breakfast but filled up as the day went on.

Lysandra looked up from her tray as Aelin sat down, greeted her with a quiet hello, and then refocused on her task of mixing her milk into her oatmeal. 

“Fenrys not here?” Aelin asked eying the empty chair between them. She lifted up the black plastic lids on her bowls. Oatmeal, scrambled eggs, one piece of toast with butter, cup of tea. Was that what she ordered last night? She couldn’t remember. Didn’t matter, it was just food. Nobody knew how to cook in this damn hospital, anyway.

“Breakfast,” Lysandra whispered, keeping her eyes trained on her oatmeal. Aelin counted as she stirred, one, two, three, four, five times before Lysandra’s words filtered through her brain and she uncovered their meaning. It was breakfast time, and Fenrys only came out for lunch and dinner. Something he said about breakfast food being offensive, she couldn’t remember. Fuck, she couldn’t remember. 

She looked out the window, eyebrows lifting when she caught sight of the snow lightly covering the ground and some of the cars in the parking lot. “It snowed,” she commented, knowing that Lysandra would find this information agreeable. For some reason, (Aelin couldn’t remember right now why) Lysandra had a fascination with the color white. Something about the purity of the color, the cleanliness, the pristine and immaculate feeling. It was the only color Lysandra would dress in. Today she was wearing her favorite white bath robe, long brown hair wrapped up and hidden away in a white bath towel, white slippers on her feet and white wool gloves covering her hands. Aelin had never seen her in another color.

Lysandra’s emerald green eyes sparkled as she, too, looked out the window, oatmeal forgotten for a moment. She made a small noise of contentment before turning back to her food. Aelin continued to stare out the window, watching the paths of the snowflakes as they drifted slowly down, losing sight of them when they hit the ground below. There was something she had wanted to ask Lysandra, something she had wanted to talk about? She couldn’t remember. Oh wait, her dream. 

Aelin pictured the rolling wheat field again, imagined herself dancing and twirling among the flaxen stalks, particles catching in her hair, bare feet stomping small pebbles as she let her spirit loose and enjoyed the world for what it was. What a nice dream.

“You took your meds.” Lsyandra’s voice dragged her back to the dining hall and Aelin frowned. It had not been a nice dream. It had been terrible. She held her hand to her throat, feeling a phantom twinge of pain from all the screaming. She should tell Lysandra about it, ask for her opinion. She opened her mouth to begin retelling the disturbing events of her nightmare, but then shut it. Too much work. Recounting the whole thing would just be too much work. She didn’t want to talk, too much effort. 

Instead, she turned back to the window and tried to count the snowflakes as they drifted whimsically down, her breakfast slowly cooling, forgotten. In the back part of her mind, the part that never gave up fighting to stay alive, a note was made (and also immediately forgotten) to avoid taking the afternoon pills at all costs. 

Raised voices came from the hallway, but Aelin ignored them and continued to stare out the window. Shout after shout entered and exited her mind without recognition, until something soft pressed down on Aelin’s hand. Aelin looked down, sleepily, at her hand and a small thrill of surprise ran through her when she identified Lysandra’s gloved hand resting atop hers. Lysandra never touched her, or anyone else if she could help it. Too many germs.

Aelin looked up at her friend, half-full of diluted concern. “What’s wrong?”

“The yelling,” Lysandra whispered, eyes wide and full of fear. “Make it stop.”

Unsure what she could do about it, Aelin pushed her chair away from the table and slowly stood up. “Don’t worry, Lys. I’ll go see what’s going on.”

A crowd of patients had already gathered at the doorway of the dining hall, everyone eager to catch a glimpse of what was going on. Using her sharp elbows and slim figure to her advantage, Aelin managed to wiggle her way to the front of the group just in time to see two burly security guards sprint past the doorway. 

“What’s going on?” she asked the man to her left. Erik, she thought his name was. 

“New admit,” he gleefully informed her, raising up on the tips of his toes to peer down the hallway. “Sounds like he’s putting up a fight. I’ve never seen this many security guards needed for one person!”

Aelin hummed, raising up on her own toes in an effort to see what was going on. She heard a door slam open and voices yelling, “Come on now, stop fighting!” and “Hold his arms, hold his arms!” Above the frantic shouts of the security guard, Aelin heard a deep voice spitting and hollering a variety of inventive cuss words, some new to even Aelin herself. 

Bodies pressed closer around her as the voices grew louder, moving closer to where they were. She spotted a flash of silver between the security guards (four in total) and then the rest of her world faded away. He was beautiful, absolutely gorgeous. And she knew him. She knew him, from somewhere, she was certain she did. Everything about him was so familiar: the tanned golden skin, the shoulder-length silver hair, the bold lines of tattoos running from the side of his face down beneath the collar of his shirt. She knew him. They made eye contact, as the guards dragged him closer, and she thought she might faint. Maybe she had been hit by lightning, electricity zipping through her veins. She knew him.

His eyes widened as they stared at each other, and she knew, deep in her bones, down to the echoing bottomless cavern of her soul, that he knew her too. 

And then his lips curled up in a snarl and he spat in her direction, “What are you looking at, you filthy whore?”


End file.
